We have not yet exhausted, however, what can be learned from
role theory alone. In our society, anxious self-scrutiny (not to be confused
with critical self-examination) not only serves to regulate information signaled
to others and to interpret signals received; it also establishes an ironic distance
from the deadly routine of daily life. On the one hand, the degradation of work
makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus
encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it
discourages commitment to the job and drives people, as the only alternative
to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment. When jobs
consist of little more than meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly
dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the workerwhether he
toils on an assembly line or holds down a high-paying job in a large bureaucracyseeks
to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance
from his daily routine. He attempts to transform role playing into a symbolic
elevation of daily life. He takes refuge in jokes, mockery, and cynicism. If
he is asked to perform a disagreeable task, he makes it clear that he doesn't
believe in the organization's objectives of increased efficiency and greater
output. If he goes to a party, he shows by his actions that it's all a gamefalse,
artificial, insincere; a grotesque travesty of sociability. In this way he attempts
to make himself invulnerable to the pressures of the situation. By refusing
to take seriously the routines he has to perform, he denies their capacity to
injure him. Although he assumes that it is impossible to alter the iron limits
imposed on him by society, a detached awareness of those limits seems to make
them matter less. By demystifying daily life, he conveys to himself and others
the impression that he has risen beyond it, even as he goes through the motions
and does what is expected of him.

As more and more people find themselves working at jobs that are in fact beneath
their abilities, as leisure and sociability themselves take on the qualities
of work, the posture of cynical detachment becomes the dominant style of everyday
intercourse. Many forms of popular art appeal to this sense of knowingess and
thereby reinforce it. They parody familiar roles and themes, inviting the audience
to consider itself superior to its surroundings. Popular forms begin to parody
themselves: Westerns take off on Westerns; soap operas like Fernwood, Soap,
and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, assure the viewer of his own sophistication
by mocking the conventions of soap opera. Yet much popular art remains romantic
and escapist, eschews this theater of the absurd, and promises escape from routine
instead of ironic detachment from it. Advertising and popular romance dazzle
their audience with visions of rich experience and adventure. They promise not
cynical detachment but a piece of the action, a part in thedrama instead of
cynical spectatorship. Emma Bovary, prototypical consumer of mass culture, still
dreams; and her dreams, shared by millions, intensify dissatisfaction with jobs
and social routine.

Unreflective accommodation to routine becomes progressively more difficult
to achieve. While modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their
intelligence, the mass culture of romantic escape fills their heads with visions
of experience beyond their meansbeyond their emotional and imaginative
capacities as welland thus contributes to a further devaluation of routine.
The disparity between romance and reality, the world of the beautiful people
and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but
also that cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest
improvements in work and play, and to restore meaning and dignity to everyday
life.

SOURCE: Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life
in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1979), pp.
171-174.